If it's real, it's probably the cats fucking with us again.
I'm pretty sure we're going to one day discover that the human impulse to gather in large, concentrated groups, our civilization building impulse, is the result of a parasite optimizing it's chances for reproductive success.
That is, if they let us discover that.
2- No, they said there was no correlation with sex.
You have the stupid virus if your hand is bigger than your face.
The stupid virus revealed my epidermis for all the world to see.
The stupid virus told me the bottom of a pool smells like roses.
I once heard someone try the joke in seven but mix up the word and tell someone his epididymis was showing.
Maybe stupid people are more likely to eat algae.
Oh my god this must be why I don't have a PhD. Is there any cure for the stupid virus?
Sure. It's at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.
I wonder if I have it. I suck at visual spatial performance tasks.
They think that viruses may be implicated in schizophrenia ax well.
If it is a virus I think I can pinpoint the exact moment over a dozen years ago when I first contracted it.
I took two very solid blows to the head on two separate occasions in the first year after I started college. I've always wondered what they may have done to me. On the plus side, I now remember to wear seat belts.
Clearly, the solution to the threat posed by the stupid virus is grade inflation.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I was just feeling more stupid because of having moved into a peer group with smarter people and because of being able to drink much, much more easily.
Can one take drugs to eradicate this virus?
Professor James L. Van Etten of the University of Nebraska, who was a member of the research team, told Newsweek that little is currently known about how the virus could be transmitted to humans in such abundance, but that they had "no reason to believe that [the viruses] are contagious among people or animals".
Van Etten said that the team has yet to identify any potential indicators of the virus's presence in humans. "My best guess is that these viruses may infect another microorganism besides the algae that we have been studying... This other microorganism may be the way that the virus gets into the throat," he added.
It would be surprising if this virus or any other member of the Chlorovirus family actually infects human cells. It may be a virus that infects some sort of single-celled organism that itself is in the oral cavity of some people rather than others.
It also says in the paper:"There are several questions relating to ATCV-1 exposure in humans that remain to be addressed. One concerns the source of the acquisition of ATCV-1 in the virome. ATCV-1-like viruses are common in inland waters such as those around Baltimore, so exposure to these water sources would be relatively common. "
3 is my zombie movie plot. The only thing that allows us to gather and live in these huge communities is that we're all infected with this otherwise harmless bacterium that suppresses our natural crowd stress reaction. Then a virus arises that kills the bacterium and suddenly people find themselves fully healthy and conscious for the first time, seeing and smelling thousands of other humans around them in intolerable proximity, and go completely berserk.
Spider Robinson wrote a fairly terrible version of that plot -- mad scientist releases something (virus? contagious worldwide immediately anyway) that gives everyone a hyper-acute sense of smell, with the result that everyone surrounded by crowds of people loses their mind. Then it went on into peculiar racial politics and impalpable creatures only detectable by smell, except when they were killing people, but the premise was similar.
PNAS published a response saying their samples are contaminated and a response to the response saying they weren't. Can anyone tell which one looks more likely?
23 Do iPhone atlatl's figure in it?
23: Empirically, I think it would be hard to make the case that Baltimore makes people stupid.
27 My bane, the extraneous apostrophe. Argh.
"smelling thousands of other humans around them in intolerable proximity" - oh, like during pregnancy?
No, the scifi plot where people have aliens in their stomachs that violently erupt has already been done.
On the veldt, the people who couldn't see the lions in the tall grass didn't get into Olduvai U.
23: Schizophrenia, anxiety disorders reflect a whole or partial resistance to the parasite.
Wait - so if I want my child to grow up into an independent functioning adult, I'm schizophrenic?
If you want your child to grow up into an independent functioning adult because the voices suggest it.
There's also the smell, teenage boy laundry and frankly teenage boy post dance class. Love the kid, not the microbes.
The instinct to care for one's young predates civilization by a bit.
And being able to induce auditory hallucinations to broadcast public service announcements is at least five years away.
Hang on, did they rule out that this is a virus one normally only gets by doing something stupid?
39 We can recreate the bicameral mind.
Does the article say how well algae with the stupid virus do on spatial reasoning tests?
'Cause every good study needs a control group, right?
23-25: Very different mechanism of course, but it reminds me of Nightfall.
3: Language is a virus from outer space. (Also, part of the plot of the Invisibles comic book, which was otherwise disappointing.)
--- It would be very convenient for me if the paper in the OP was right, but the bizarreness of an algal virus causing cognitive impairment in mammals makes me skeptical. (Still, if it's killed by modern water processing, we'd have an easy biological explanation for the Flynn Effect...)
That reminds me that I once read (or maybe just read the back of at a bookstore) a book arguing that Bubonic Plague came from outer space.
Everything came from outer space, if you trace it back far enough.
Probably. It would be about the right age.
27: once the plague has swept the world, the survivors will find that humanity has been engaged in a host parasite arms race to the point where the unsuppressed crowd stress response is now so strong that no one can stand being around anyone ever. Society is reduced to nothing but a collection of desperate lonely people, longing for physical contact but unable to sustain it because of the anxiety it causes them, living out their social lives through electronic communication.
...Hey, they told me to write what I know.
Once we're all infected, unvaccinated, and crowded, the quorum sensing will kick in and the real behavioral goal will be invoked. Thousand-person dance mobs. People growing fungal antlers. We start bioluminescing.
(All real parasitic/commensal/quorum sensing examples.)
54 At least we'll always have the blog. Even if no one can stand to sex Mutombo anymore.
Oddly on topic, some cranks are arguing for (directed!) panspermia again. Remember, the simplest explanation is always that we were seeded by aliens.
herg blerg girl x is not recovering well from surgery. my man romi hasn't slept in 3 days from taking care his wife and daughter with dengue fever. they finally admitted her last night, his daughter. they haven't even tried to get his wife into hospital; she's allegedly getting better already. I walked past a million innocent people waiting for their queue numbers to be called, so that I could be photographed and then merits of my fake job reconsidered in the still remarkably crappy 100-degree canteen, at immigrasi kontrol, and they made my passport up in a jiffy, and now that my visa has been extended to 30 days I will fly home tomorrow and spend the night at national university hospital. I am very happy to be going home and happy that I can help romi's family (though I think the staff at siloam hospital need some talking-to about morphine drips, frankly; it's called "break bone fever" for a reason.) but I also think I might have a total physical collapse sometime. maybe what I need to do here is go paleo. right? pretty obvious now that I think about it. I'll just go change my breakfast order on the door thingie to 'british.'
can I eat honey, or only if I also knock the nest down myself and eat the larvae? asking for a friend.
56: along very similar lines, bali appears to have a thriving '90s throwback drum and bass club scene. with graffiti and everything. there's no reason why not, it's just I don't think of really dance oriented music being retro like that...no, it's like funk night? but funk clubs? and funk taggers? sure.
really dance oriented music being retro like that
I think dance music lives partly of a mostly false reputation for being all about the new. Much/most newish dance music could have been made at any point in the last 25 years. I hear supposedly hip new records fairly often that sound indistinguishable from late 80s house.
(Still, if it's killed by modern water processing, we'd have an easy biological explanation for the Flynn Effect...)
The anti-fluoride brigade are clearly minions helping with the "make them stupid first" tactics of the invading aliens.
that sounds plausible. if not actually dancing (or running, when I had between your bones thingies) I wouldn't listen to new dance music and otherwise probably just listen to derrick carter or be excited there's new old aphex twin tracks.
60. Jesus, al, wish there was more I could do than keep my fingers crossed!
There are those here who are much more knowledgeable about dance music than me [Alex, Sifu, etc] but I think I'm right that dance music moves by very very small increments, and christens entire new genres on the basis of very small differences.
'Well, the beats are more 118 bpm than 120, and there's more of an emphasis on the 1 in the bass line.'
'I call this, deep-funky-tech-house.'
I mean, I'm excited about that last thing now. there's a lot of algae in the water in indonesia. I think I'll try to sleep for 12 hours since I can worry less about my daughter. she was crying happy that I was coming home. sniff.
thanks chris y! I'm grateful to have all the awesome doctors of singapore on call, and that I don't have to think about which hospital I can afford before I take my kid to the hospital at all. we're trying to get romi's daughter moved to a better ward, and husband x (feeling sympathetic naturally) is on board with paying her hospital bill. I'm lucky even to be able to be useful to people since it's through no acumen or hard work on my part, so I'm trying to take everything in a thankful spirit except the girls in terrible pain part which I want to smash to death with rocks. hopefully they will be both feeling better really soon. 10 minutes ago. two loving dads sleeping in chairs and cots and not at all for a few nights too, they are tired also. I hope everyone can rest.